Furthest Page 7

  7. I do not feel that I have necessarily obtained any information of great value with regard to these people (although the computers may react to the data far differently than I do.) I continue to have the constant feeling that I am attending some elaborate theatrical being performed, with impatience, for my benefit. On the other hand I see no evidence for any such conclusion—it remains intuitive. It is simply that everything is so formal, so precise, so perfect—it is difficult to believe that real life could go on that way for any group of human beings for any length of time. We shall see.

  8. With reference to my previous report, FILE 803.09.a, Segment 1, and your reply to same: it is not possible at this time for me to make any attempt to investigate any other of the alleged citydomes on this planet. The others are all at a considerable distance from K’ith Vaad, and my traveling to them by any means other than slitherboat would cause an incredible flap, since I am forbidden to do anything of the kind. Since I am expected to be at the MESH seven nights a week there is no segment of time available when I could plausibly make such a journey by slitherboat as would be involved in further exploration of this kind. It is my personal opinion that even one such empty dome is sufficient cause for alarm; let us not compound our problems by finding that all the rest are empty, too.

  9. I will continue as indicated. I am aware, as you have pointed out, that time is passing by and only eighteen months were originally allotted to me. It is not necessary for you to remind me with such regularity of the deadline which hangs over me, and if you continue to do so I will return to GALCENTRAL and allow you to carry on here personally. I am sure you would find it quite pleasant, since you prefer machines to women in any event.

  END OF REPORT

  PS: In case it isn’t clear, you old fart, get off my back or I won’t do your stupid job.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “madness became her—

  she wore her follies in her hair; she was so lovely

  none of us would have had her cured; and

  when she took a slender silver knife

  and set to killing

  we knew ourselves, one and all,

  for murderers.”

  (from “The Nine Hundred Fables for Autumn Afternoons,”

  by Christopher Ganges)

  Well. Another night, another dose of hell?

  He lay there rigid in bed, his hands in fists at his sides, his muscles tense and knotted, feeling as if he lay in fire and wishing he did, determined to get through this night as he had gotten through the interminable succession of other ones.

  There were things to think about, after all, things to pass the hours by and get him through to morning again. He could think, for example, of all the slow and subtle and exquisite ways that he could make the Fish pay for sending him here. Unfortunately, he was not a violent man, and that gave him very little pleasure, although he felt that he might easily become a violent man if things went on the way they had to date.

  Let’s see. If torturing the Fish was out, he could always torture himself. He could review his present situation and reckon up all his failures, for example.

  There was all the time he’d been here, now. All the days and nights and weeks he’d been the happy but slightly stupid little shopkeeper from outer space, introducing the locals to the delights of that intergalactic social institution, the MESH. And where had it gotten him? It had gotten him bored and miserable, there was that. But gain? He knew little more than he had the first day.

  The cold Furthesters came and went in his MESH, listened politely to his songs, and perhaps they listened with pleasure, since many of them came back time after time, but if they felt pleasure they showed no sign of it. They never used the MF stations to the edcomputers. They rarely bought anything from the shelves. They behaved exactly as if the MESH had been a museum; they strolled through looking with well-mannered interest at the exhibits, stopped for a song or some refreshment, then strolled out, unaffected. He had had no luck at setting up some sort of nucleus for community life at the MESH, some nexus of Furthester interaction which he could observe and learn from. Chalk up Failure One.

  What else?

  He thrashed in the bed. Unlike his bed back at the asteroid he called home, it did not adapt itself pliably to his movements. Furthester through and through, it lay there under him unyielding and let him bruise himself flopping around on it.

  What else? He had learned nothing about these people. He had been ignoring the constant stream of demands from the Fish reports, because he had nothing to report. There had been no repetitions of the visit to RK’s parents’ home. Apparently the boy had been able to persuade them only to the single token visit and that had been their absolute limit. He had attempted to talk, to get into conversations, to learn, but every trial was met with the same bland, unyielding, unresponding refusal to communicate. He rarely saw a living human being except for RK and the museum-strollers; and when he did see one, if he was seen first he was passed by hastily with head turned, as if he did not exist. Getting chatty with totally determined no-chatters was an exercise in futility. Chalk up Failure Two.

  He had thought to probe more deeply into these people by growing close to RK, or perhaps to Bess, since he could not reach any of the others. But Bess kept to her rooms on the third floor—or did she live in a tent up there, since there were no rooms?—and RK maintained a continual shield of closed reserve, just as the rest of his people did. Coyote could have forced past that shield, of course, but if he had done so the boy would have known him at once for what he was, and that would have been sure to lead to expulsion from this planet, perhaps a very premature expulsion with no hope of return and no way to repair the damage. Chalk up Failure Three.

  So he was a failure. So what? So where was the guilt he was supposed to be feeling? The population of three galaxies depended upon him and him alone to succeed in determining what a Furthester was made of, and all he could think of was his own misery. Never mind the fact that the fate of three galaxies might well rest on his shoulders. Never mind the fact that a madman might be president of the Tri-Galactic Council the next time around because he, Coyote Jones, had not been able to concentrate on his assignment sufficiently to finish it. Never damn mind…

  It was impossible. Here he was, in the midst of Victorian England Transplanted, him, Coyote Jones, who had happily made happy as many as four women in a single night. Here he was, surrounded by swathed creatures who exposed their hands and their heads, no more, and who might not have bodies at all but were perhaps single columns of aluminum and fiberglass for all that he could determine from being around them.

  He had been so long now without a woman that he could think of nothing else with any clarity. About the thought of a woman, on the other hand, there was an overpoweringly brutal clarity that was driving him mad.

  Not once, not since the first time when he had lain at the age of thirteen with an elderly but infinitely experienced professional on Mars Central, not once in all those years had he been so long without a woman, nor half so long, for that matter. It was unbelievable that he could still think at all, much less think coherently. He was maimed, tormented, destroyed, a poor blind creature in a state of advanced rut, and the hell with them. The hell with the populations of the Three Galaxies, and the hell with the Tri-Galactic Council. That was how he was, and if they didn’t like it they should have sent a robot.

  It had been funny, for a while. He had made lame jokes to himself about it. He had always enjoyed such an abundance of women that he had informed himself it was only fair to give someone else a chance. He had decided it was only justice that he should now go wanting. He had even taken the antisex pills they had sent with him, in spite of their disgustingly cute name—anti-tume, who’d thought of it? He should be castrated. He’d taken them for weeks, in spite of the fact that if he took enough of them to really do anything about his constant tumescence they made him throw up and suffer from violent diarrhea, and unless he took enough of them to incapacitate
him they had no effect on him at all.

  He’d been a good sport, he had. But now it was becoming decidedly unfunny. He wasn’t having any more. He ached all over, his body felt like a vast boil, he was a great deal too old and set in his ways to take up masturbation, and the idea that he was duty-bound to stay here and spend months more in this condition was too much. He couldn’t do it.

  It did no good to lecture himself about his damn duty. It did no good to tell himself that he was being immature. It did no good at all.

  He groaned and turned over onto his back for the thousandth miserable time, his whole mind one seething turmoil of thought of warm receiving female flesh, breasts and thighs and vaginas and all the rest of it, and wondered how it could be that the terrible pressure of his hunger did not simply bring the building down around him, and felt certain, knew for certain, that he wasn’t going to be able to bear it this time.

  And then a bell rang, like a gong, somewhere, and the words came fast upon its tone…

  >hush… let me help you.

  Help me?

  He had time for only that one thought, and then the sprays of gold began behind his eyes, curling and uncurling, forming intricate dancing patterns that swooped toward him up to the last impossible instant before they burned him alive, grew and grew into roses of tender gold blooming into fountains, and then burst into trailing golden dust, chiming as they broke.

  It was suddenly green, the green of the sea, full of the luminous rainbow color of the waters of Furthest, streaming before him into a distance that turned a corner and was somehow behind him turning it again as he faced it still, into a distance he could not measure, and he was the rainbows, all of him went rapidly blue and gold and green and flashed again into the fountains of scarlet through which he flew, a great garlanded bird that melted once more into a golden rose and floated down into the sea.

  There was a roaring… wind, was it? And words, he knew there were words, but he could not understand them, it was a miracle, a thing of wonder that he got one or two here or there because he never had before, always before he had thought that he was completely deaf to mind-projected words, and what could this be that was cutting through his ancient inability and healing it so? There was a roaring, and water and mingled words, bits of reassurance, promises that it would be all right, it would be beautiful beyond description, and he believed it all eagerly as a child.

  He was high above a canyon that flickered, purple, the color of sun-drugged love under cedars. Something caught him, there was a sensation of knots being untied behind his eyes, and on some high irresistible wind he streamed out and up and out over the canyon, borne by and born in the singing wind, with the flickering beneath him first water, then canyon, then the deserts of an unknown world, then the canyon again, then a field of scarlet vines through which he looped and dived and grew and knew he could never fall again…

  He was not sure just where and when it was that he first screamed, or if he screamed aloud. Somewhere when the… what?… slipped into his mind and took up being the lovely things with him, and he became aware that in his mind there were tendrils with which to twine and twine and curl gently, intricately, in a dreaming dance of love… but who was it? And what was it?

  The ecstasy, coming after the deprivation, washed over him in a tide, left him drenched with the juices of his own need, thinking that surely this was the end, that no higher pitch of joy could be reached without his dying of it. And just as he was sure of it he would be caught up again, held and wound round, part of a pattern that he only glimpsed before it ceased to be and was another, a slipping into crevices deliciously where only thought had been before, a burst of cinnamon and orange and wine upon his sight, a feeling of small chords sounding smelling of pale yellow and white, a glimpse of hands pressing him, stroking him, tendrils winding him, until he knew he was going to come one more impossible time…

  I CAN’T BEAR IT.

  NOT ANY MORE… He thought finally, broken with joy and fullness, and at once there were ferns, cool green ferns, where he lay warm, unable to even imagine what hunger might be again, and then it was over.

  It was over, and he lay staring up into the black darkness of his own room, where the ceiling clock told him it was three o’clock, and his whole bed was torn apart as if he had been caught in a hurricane and blown through it, soaked and salty and reeking with semen and sweat, and what—what in the name of all the saints and gods had that been?

  He thought first that he would get up. Then he was afraid that he could not. And then it became clear to him that what he really felt, beyond amazement, was whole and renewed, and incredibly good, good beyond memory. He jumped out of the bed naked and wet like he was and went out of his room toward RK’s. Whatever that had been, that incredible thing, it had been something of this world, something that RK would know about and that he, Coyote, was going to have to know about. He went into RK’s room and shook him until he sat up blinking with sleep and stared at Coyote.

  “What is it, Citizen Jones?” he mumbled.

  Coyote grinned at him. “You see me?” he said. “You see the condition I’m in?” And then he remembered and turned on the light. “See me?” he repeated, “do you see? You see before you a man who’s just been laid—pardon the shocking expression, O Furthester, but it’s true and exact—a man who’s just been laid by a legion of angels or a battalion of devils, he doesn’t know which.”

  “You have been dreaming, Citizen,” said RK in a careful voice, fully awake now.

  “Oh, no! I’m not sure I could survive whatever that was twice, but I assure you I didn’t sleep through it the first time, and I wouldn’t trade it for ten years of my life. RK, do you know what it was? Do you? Can you tell me?”

  The boy spoke slowly. “I don’t think I understand you, Citizen. I’m sorry.”

  Coyote started trying to explain, realized there were no words that would handle it, and then saw, unmistakably, that he was being had. RK was white and sick and shaking, and if he were genuinely bewildered he had nothing to be disturbed about,

  “You know perfectly well what I mean,” Coyote accused him. “Now tell me!”

  RK shook his head and turned his back, burrowing stubbornly into the depths of his bed.

  “You had a dream,” he muttered, yawning elaborately. “Why do you come bothering me with your dreams, Citizen?”

  Coyote pulled the boy around to face him and gripped his shoulders fiercely.

  “Don’t lie to me, RK,” he breathed. “Tell me what that was!”

  “No! It is forbidden!”

  “Forbidden? Nonsense! Tell me!”

  RK shook his head again, stubborn and grim and white-lipped, and Coyote laughed. He was exultant with his relief, and the glory of what he had just known, and a feeling of being new forever. He had no time or patience left for stubborn boys who lived in cultural straitjackets. He forgot all about ethics, he forgot the danger of frightening this single tenuous link he had with the people of Furthester, and he gathered his mind like a whip around the single command tell and lashed it all at RK at once.

  RK could no more have withstood that than he could have chosen not to breathe. He fell back against his pillow like one struck brutally, as indeed he had been, and the words poured from his Hps.

  “It was my sister,” he said, tears streaming down his cheeks. “Curse you for an outworld dog, you are just as the Elders say that you are, a dog, a filthy animal…”

  Coyote ignored the outpouring of bitter words, and shook the boy gently, once again.

  “RK,” he pleaded, “what do you mean—it was your sister? You mean it was Bess?”

  “Yes! Yes, it was Bess, curse her, too, curse her…”

  He moaned it over and over, and pity touched Coyote even in the midst of his happiness, and he took his hands away from him.

  “How could it have been Bess, RK?” he asked. “Tell me.”

  “She’s a mindwife,” RK cried, a cry of pure despair, “she’s a mindwife,
perhaps the greatest one that there has ever been in all the history of my people! And I should have killed her long ago!”

  “RK,” said Coyote gently, “what is a mindwife? Can you tell me? I won’t force you, don’t be afraid—just let me know, can you tell me?”

  “You know what a mindwife is,” the boy hissed, “you just lay with one! Have you forgotten already?”

  “No… that’s not it. I want details, RK, information. I think it is very important that I know.”

  “It is forbidden,” mourned RK, “forbidden. It is forbidden that I should even have said the word to you, and I could not help it, and I am as great a traitor as she is now, I have betrayed my people and am accursed forever…”

  He fell into a hopeless, heartbroken sobbing, and Coyote could push him no farther. This was much worse than he had meant it to be, but he had not realized the barrier was so great.

  “RK,” he said finally, “one thing… since it is forbidden for your people to tell me about this, could I find out from the Furthester edcomputers?”

  RK sat straight up in the bed, the sobs choked off, his face white with terror.

  “If you do that,” he breathed, “if you use your offworld credit disc and do that, the police will come and we are all dead as of that moment, my sister and I for traitors and you for a dirty spy. Are you going to do it?”